So, the Vindalunar tweet counter has reached 100%. When it happened, the display fucked up for a short while, and then the webcam feed was replaced by a countdown. So, we were counting down to a countdown. Brilliant. Presumably, the smeg balloon, or whatever it is, will be launched at 1:30pm BST.

EDIT: It’s done. Read on for a full report.

13:03 Yes, hilariously, a brief snippet of the launch taking place was accidentally broadcast on the webcam feed at around 1pm. I was able to see it, as I hadn’t refreshed the page to get the countdown. As you can see from the picture, this confirms that the launch date of Red Dwarf X is Thursday 4th October 2012.

Let’s watch the thing at 1:30pm anyway. This is a very important lesson – TV lies to you.

14:26 Well, then. That went well. 1:30pm rolled around, and the “live” feed started… except, it was the wrong bloody feed.

Yes, somehow they managed to embed something called Vinesauce Vidya, which was showing an old woman calling EA Games ‘motherfuckers’, interspersed with footage of cats in boxes and horses pissing about. This is utterly staggering. Presumably it was some sort of copying and pasting error; with ‘Vinesauce Vidya’ being close to ‘Vindalunar’, they would have probably been next to each other in some sort of big list. But… Jesus wept. That’s quite a monumental error.

When this whole shebang started last Friday, I was cynical about the nature of this stunt, simply because of the whole curry-and-lager thing. It’s a rod that’s often used to beat Red Dwarf by the Andrew Collinses of this world – the myth that it’s a show about a slobby bloke in space who says ‘smeg’ and eats curry, which wilfully ignores the extraordinary sci-fi concepts, the fully evolved character comedy and the superb ensemble cast. But I at least expected this dodgy idea to be implemented well, and it simply hasn’t been.

I must admit that the shots of the thing actually on the edges of the Earth’s atmosphere looked great, but those few moments aren’t enough to nudge my summary of the Vindalunar campaign away from the status of: an embarrassment.

At the time of writing, the fucker is still up there in space. I’ll keep watching to see what happens, and I’ll update if it comes crashing down to Earth and destroys someone’s house.

15:27 Oh for FUCK’S SAKE! We spend nearly two hours watching some curry and lager floating around in the sky. Then at around quarter past three, finally something happens – the balloon and the payload become detached from each other, and the thing started falling to Earth! Hooray, this will be exciting!

Except, the fuckers then switched off the feed within less than a minute, replacing it with this:

You’ve got to be fucking kidding. We wait around for all that time, waiting for some sort of conclusion to this broadcast… and they cut away from it. What an absolute mess. Just putting some curry and lager quite high up in the air isn’t enough; there needed to be something to round the event up.

And then the regurgitated cherry on the shit-smeared cake: THAT’S THE WRONG DATE, IDIOTS. THE ENTIRE POINT OF THIS EXERCISE WAS TO PUBLICISE THE START DATE OF THE SERIES, AND THE FINAL IMAGE IS OF THE WRONG DATE.

Honestly. Several of us G&Ters work in television, and we understand that it’s not always easy, and that it’s just a bunch of fallible humans working behind the scenes, and that mistakes can happen. But there have been so many mistakes today that we can only describe #vindalunar as an utter failure.

The company behind this campaign is called Five by Five. They emailed us a press release earlier, asking if we’d be covering the story. We don’t think they’re going to like our coverage…

If this launch date isn’t accompanied by a soon to be viral-video of Danny and Blue Midget dancing with an android version of Nena to ’99 Smeg Balloons’ while Craig chugs vindaloo sauce in the background, Dave will have utterly failed to meet the early promise of this brilliant promo campaign.

To be honest, I can’t really bring myself to pour too much scorn over this whole venture. It is pretty pointless, but I don’t think it’s aimed at hardcore fans and is at least an attempt by some berk in the Dave marketing team to do something a bit different. Although I’d rather have just had another trailer or a nice photo gallery or some synopses. If they’d avoided the whole tedious tweeting element and just said, ‘We’re going to launch some stuff into space’ – it would have worked a lot better.

>The tone of this article is rather angry, but I’m more just disappointed.

Likewise, even without the benefit of having seen any of the series yet.

In the scheme of things, we’re the audience in the darkened theatre waiting for the veteran act to take to the stage for the first time in years.
A few have been lucky enough to peep backstage and are excitedly whispering to the rest of us that we’re in for a treat. They’ve still got it. The anticipation is huge.

The fanfare begins on the PA – now is the time to signal the grand entrance…then the tape inexplicably turns to a ranting Russian granny, a cat somehow gets loose on the stage, the mis-spelled backdrop crashes to the ground and the lighting rig blows up.

What is there for the fans to do but look at each other uneasily in embarrassment?

>I was actually going to defend this (no, really) as it was just promotion and was essentially getting people talking.

The problem is a lot of people are probably thinking “Oh, it’s just on digital now? What, new ones on Dave? It’s probably going to look really cheap and not going to be as good”. It’s narrow minded of course, but I’m sure a lot of people view original digital programming as having a veneer of naffness about it – and today certainly wouldn’t persuade anyone otherwise.

I think had it just been a countdown followed by the launch footage it would have gone down better. I don’t hate the overall idea as much as some people, I just think it’s been appallingly executed. Seeing the prop in space was kind of nice, but the whole Twitter build up was just awful. Plus as has been said in the main article, this really needed something to finish it off like a pre-filmed piece with Craig. The big thing the Back to Earth promotion had going for it was that we felt more involved by having little trailers and mini sites to grab interest that built to an actual event that people could attend.

I want to bang my head on a desk every time someone in marketing believes that putting something on Twitter or Facebook for people to like or tweet is enough and ‘gets people engaged’. It’s so simple to click on a button that it becomes almost meaningless. I mean, how many casual viewers that tweeted #vindalunar would really have been checking it regularly to see when it reached 100%? If it was meant to be publicising the launch date then it failed totally here.

>I don’t know, I suspect the cast members who were actually hired and paid to make an absolutely brilliant series of Red Dwarf without him will probably have the last laugh.

I don’t doubt that – even putting together a middling series would be a superb achievement.

I was more referring to Norm’s infamous ‘laughs take a holiday’ comment and the schadenfreude he seems to take in any negativity about new Dwarf (RTing any negative comment about BTE that came his way etc.)

Ha ha ha ha ha. This whole micky mouse campaign, has been hilarious. I waited patiently for 1.30pm. And then got the horse. I think it was Just random stuff from the general vídeo site They had the loop links running from. Cus that name of that thing was always What i saw in an error link when viewing vindalunar on my phone and the Cus wasnt supported.

Só thanks for posting picture early GandT Cus i had to go to Walk to work, and i missed the launch. But i was chuckling About the mistakes, and the random horse all the way to work, thinking that Vindalunar really doesnt matter, and Its funny people hate it só much. But then all of a sudden i changed my mind, i really fucking hate it now. Cus i just Got hit on the head by a can and some cold smelly meat in a foil container. Fuck you five brain cells by five minutes of thought. Oh ouch. Now a crocodile!

So the fans keep Series X spoiler free for 9 months. The press see episode 1 and they have already spoiled the plot for it in less than 24 hours! Won’t link to it of course but it wasn’t exactly hard to find.

Ok, just a quick note even though I’m sure it’s obvious to most of you: if anyone finds the link to the website spoiling plot points, please don’t link to it here. If the mainstream media start spoiling stuff that’s a different matter, but at the moment it’s one twatty website being twats.

> If they’d avoided the whole tedious tweeting element and just said, ‘We’re going to launch some stuff into space’ – it would have worked a lot better.

My parallel universe: One poppadom, with one tiny little balloon, is launched every time a tweet comes in. Every time one lands, someone finds it and says, “Oh look, a bit of poppadom!” then notices that the little balloon reads “RDX: 04.10.12.”

Richard Naylor
@RichardDGNaylor
@DoctorIJones9@pecospete_666Just make sure you watch it in HD;)
04:15 PM – 29 Aug 12via web
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>So the fans keep Series X spoiler free for 9 months. The press see episode 1 and they have already spoiled the plot for it in less than 24 hours! Won’t link to it of course but it wasn’t exactly hard to find.

I can’t be very good at this google-lark anymore as I can’t find it. I’ve seen an assembly cut of the episode so was after a refresher rather than spoilers, to be honest. Much obliged if someone can hook me up outside of the site.

I never had anything against this Vindalunar lark and in a way I still don’t. I was glad Dave seemed to be putting some effort in with promotion and really encouraged when the percentage started to really rocket up when the trailers started to be broadcast on Dave. Now, after the fuck up of this afternoon, I still don’t really mind as this article and it’s comments have made me laugh harder than I have in a good while!

I can’t be very good at this google-lark anymore as I can’t find it. I’ve seen an assembly cut of the episode so was after a refresher rather than spoilers, to be honest. Much obliged if someone can hook me up outside of the site.

If you tell me where to send it then sure. They have fucked up a little bit though and combined the plot of two episodes, so you might not want to see it.

It’s incredibly diffiicult to detach myself from the experience of it, as the atmosphere was incredible. In terms of Episode 1, I have slight misgivings with both plot A and B (stuff that won’t bother casual viewers, it has to be said), but I think they both pay off well at the episode’s finale. The ground it covers isn’t wholly original to the show, I still wish the performances could be toned down occasionally and I’m not totally sure about the guest cast, but I think it had A LOT of potential in the early cut. Can’t wait to see it edited together.

I feel bad for the people who put this together. At least they tried. You hear countless stories of cult TV shows getting absolutely no love at all from their respective networks and are basically shoved in the corner of the schedule never to be heard from again. I know this is different, but you have to at least commend them for trying something different in order to promote the show. It’s just a shame it didn’t work out for them.

Bad man. = Well anyone with the number of the beast in their user name is surely leaning to the “bad” in the same way as a cinema hotdog, added to that a name synominous with one of the worst two parters in dwarf history, and it’s not looking so great, and i dont know anything about Pecos, but given the avatar, could be a gun toting texan thing who thinks his posting is as fancy as his dancing. If so. Forgive the confrontational imperative – go bother another forum, you scum-sucking mollusc. Or at least talk dwarf here and not people or pictures. We are getting side tracked here from the real issue which is how much we all hate Five by Five. Why dont you write to them, tell them all about your thoughts about Vogons.

but we’re not like the TOS forum where randomness is encouraged. Yeah, we fuck about and stuff but as least we keep to the topic if we can, not just derailing the thread with strange unconnected statements.

When I first joined here I tried way too hard to fit in, because this really is an unbelievable place compared to any other forum I’ve ever seen. It really does feel like “where the big dogs hang out” to outsiders. I was intimidated but plunged right in anyway with some stupid stuff or other.

Result: facepalms, more facepalms, and “Whatever happened to Tonguetied?” But I’ve never been asked to leave yet (knock wood) because I laid low for a while to see how everyone else interacts and figure out what I was doing wrong.

PecosPete has also commented on how awesome G&T is. And let’s not forget he contributed to Ian’s marathon fund. I think he’s an ok guy who just doesn’t understand netiquette.

Sorry I riffed over on the cowboy episode there Mr Danny sir. Didn’t mean any harm by it. I do forgive our friend, for being a couple of Gunmen short of a posse, when he’s posting cool things like the broadcst interview with doug, just all the vogon nonsense and qouting Lord Acton has less place in this town.

I thank all who have offered advice! But I have no apologies for any thing I have done!
I asked a simple question and got a crap answer! If posting photos is a problem then someone should of said something,not just cut somebody off without telling them. Hey I thought this was a open forum where all ideas could be posted. If you don’t like my sense of humor,tell me. I have no criticisms of any of the RD shows, who am I to judge!
So I have nothing to say about the technical details about the show,I just enjoy the concept and execution! So if all my words turn into penises so be it. And no I am not a Texan but I do carry a .357.

Good, because I am, and I was really starting to get embarrassed. This ain’t your typical one horse town where you can just walk into the saloon and start shooting up the place, but I think you understand that now.

Don’t take it personally, Pete. It *is* an open forum it’s just people had commented on the the volume of apparently irrelevant pictures you post and those comments seem to have gone unheard by you, so I just put something in to calm it down a bit. All pictures still show up as links at the bottom of your post and it won’t last forever. Just a quiet but effective way of us getting the message across.

I do not want into get in a pissing contest here,but did you actually see what I posted? The One or Two persons that do not understand what I posted I thought they were kidding. After the “pecospete appreciation thread it looked like photos were fair game. All my photos related to the thread they were posted in. If certain people don’t understand the connection thats their problem. I don’t complain about others irrelevant posts or photos! I’m here for the laughs and have laughed a lot and a few critics are not going to Gag me!

The image filtering that’s applied to your comments is automatic, regardless of whether the image you’re posting is relevant or not. It’s just a temporary thing, for reasons I’ve already explained.

No one’s trying to gag you. It’s our right as admins to moderate comments as we see fit and, as I said, links to your images are appended to the bottom of your comments so people can still see them if they choose to. The only thing taken away from you (temporarily) is the ability to embed images. Nothing more.

I have no desire to get into a pissing contest with you, either, nor do I have any desire to stop you being here for the laughs, or anything else.

It’s not bad, actually. It shows all the names on the display, and the balloon inflating in super high speed, with added info, plus the view from the ground as the balloon went up. In fact, this 72 second video is probably better than the whole sorry spectacle itself.

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